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Recently I have been dipping into Wolfgang Simson's "Starfish Manifesto" and watching some of the related Starfish Serie on YouTube. I shared some thoughts about the Kingdom of God with our gathering of saints today. These are my notes:

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, "Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him." In reply Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again." "How can a man be born when he is old?" Nicodemus asked. "Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born!" Jesus answered, "I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, 'You must be born again.' The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit."

v3 "no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again"v5 "no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit'

Can we see the kingdom of God? Can we enter the kingdom of God? What does it look like? What is the kingdom of God? How do we live there?

These are notes for a talk shared with our gathering of the saints on 3 May. Ruth, one of the saints in our meeting, had spoken on the Lamb of God at our previous meeting. She remarked how strange this idea seemed when she first became a believer and how difficult it is to explain to those not familiar with Christian jargon. So I went on from there to explore some other familiar yet strange concepts in Christian jargon using the message from Frank Viola's book "From Eternity to Here: Rediscovering the Ageless Purpose of God".

Opening commentsMaybe I only have one sermon. I think I have said some of this before.

IntroLast time Ruth explained for us the symbolism of Jesus our Saviour being called the 'Lamb of God', and

how strange that seemed to her when she first became a Christian in relation to the lambs on the Welsh mountains

how difficult it would be to explain the 'Lamb of God' on the streets of Eindhoven.

This morning I want to go on from there and talk about some other terms, phrases or symbols we use

on the one hand very familiar

on the other hand very strange when we start to think about them or explain them

and certainly problematic to explain on the streets of Eindhoven

I also want to try to put the sacrifice of the Lamb of God into the big picture by considering the questions:

what is God's purpose?

what is God aiming to achieve and how does the sacrifice of His Son fit in the plan?

I was asked to lead the prayers of intercession in our Sunday gathering ten days ago. Normally as part of our prayers we pray for "the world" focussing on current issues. I found it daunting to pray for the people suffering from the disasters in Myanmar and Sichuan, China. How can we pray in the face of suffering on such a scale? Suffering that natural forces have arbitrarily delivered to millions of helpless people.

Lord we pray for all those suffering from the devastation of the cyclone in Myanmar and the earthquake in China. Tens of thousands of people washed away in the cyclone as it tore across the Irrawaddy delta. Tens of thousands buried and injured in the sudden earthquake in Sichuan province China. We cannot comprehend the magnitude of the suffering.

Like Job, we are inclined to say to you God:

"Oh watcher of men
Do you have eyes of flesh?
Is your vision like man?
Are your years the years of man?"

Do you see this suffering? For it is beyond our comprehension.

But with Job we say

"I spoke without understanding
Of things beyond me which I did not know
And now I've heard you with my ears
And I've seen you with my eyes
Therefore I recant and relent
For we too are but dust and ashes"

And so we bow before you in intercession in the face of this great suffering. We pray for those who are helping the victims. And we pray for those in the Myanmar government who are preventing help getting to the people.

Lord in your mercyHear our prayer

Somehow I felt that first I had to express anger and frustration to God. "Do you have eyes of flesh? Do you see this suffering?" With the implication "do you care"? Before being able to recognise that He is sovereign. And accepting that He sees the big picture that we cannot grasp. Only then it was possible to intercede for those who are suffering.

I was caught this Sunday morning by the prayer of penitence we used in our gathering:

Lord our God,in our sin we have avoided your call.Our love for you is like a
morning cloud,like the dew that goes away early.Have mercy on
us;deliver us from judgement;bind up our wounds and revive us;in
Jesus Christ our Lord.Amen.

3 Let us acknowledge the LORD; let us press on to acknowledge him. As surely as the sun rises, he will appear; he will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth."

4 "What can I do with you, Ephraim? What can I do with you, Judah? Your love is like the morning mist, like the early dew that disappears. ..."

In my sin I have avoided God's call. My sin puts a gulf between me and the Lord. I use that to hide, to postpone heeding His call, to carry on with my own thing. Now and then I repent and recommit and enjoy a bright morning of relationship with God. But my love is indeed like a bright cloud in the early morning sky, and like the early dew - disappearing in the heat of the day, when the normal daily business gets going - forgotten.

Is the rest of the prayer enough? Is it enough to ask God to have mercy on me, to deliver me from His own judgement and to heal me? Doesn't repentance mean and require more than that? Is not repentance a radical change and determined commitment? Something that will last longer than the morning dew and a bright morning cloud?

Intro
We are doing something a bit different in our prayers today. I have taken a few
verses from each of the readings in the lectionary for today and made a prayer
from them. The focus is on our relationship with God, so the prayers are mainly
intercessions for ourselves as individuals and as a gathering of believers.

Let us pray:

"I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.

No longer will a man teach his neighbor,
or a man his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD,'
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,"
declares the LORD.
"For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more."
Jeremiah 31:33-34 (NIV)

Lord, you have offered us forgiveness as we confess our sins. But still we hold
you at a distance. We do not have only your law on our hearts and minds. We are
busy with worldly things and those too occupy our minds and direct our attention
from you. Help us to recognise all our sin and confess it so that there are no
barriers between us and you, so you can fulfil your promise to be our God and we
commit to being your people. Undivided. Only for you. One God. One people wholly
and only committed to your law and with your way on our hearts and minds and
brimming over our lips so that we do not need to be taught your way. Your way
becomes our very nature.

I have mentioned before a book I have been reading "God's Ultimate
Passion" by Frank Viola and some of you know that I went to a conference in
early June where Frank Viola was the main speaker and his presentations were an
introduction to the themes of the book. So .... it will not be surprise
that I am sharing this morning some things I am absorbing from these sources.

I am also working from the three readings we had this morning.

Isaiah 5:1-7 About the love of God for His people and how he would like the relationship to be. His disappointment.

Paul from 1 Cor 12:12-31 About the Body of Christ and its parts and their functions and relationships.

Jesus in Luke 12:49-56 with some tough statements about the conflicts and divisions He is bringing and the signs of the times

The Context
I think the reading from Isaiah provides us with some context for consideration
of the themes of the other readings. It is talking about a landowner with a
vineyard on his land and the care and effort he put into establishing and
cultivating his vineyard. And his disappointment that it did not yield any good
fruit but only bad.

What more could have been done for my vineyard
than I have done for it?
When I looked for good grapes,
why did it yield only bad? (Is 5:4 NIV)

The writer is very explicit about this story being an image of God, the
landowner, and His care and love for His people represented by the vineyard.

The vineyard of the LORD Almighty
is the house of Israel,
and the men of Judah
are the garden of his delight.
And he looked for justice, but saw bloodshed;
for righteousness, but heard cries of distress. (Is 5:7 NIV)

We can see here in microcosm the story of the OT. God created in love, hope and
expectation. He looked forward to relationship with mankind. But mankind fell
into rebellion and out of relationship with God. But God still hoped and loved
and sought ways of recovering the relationship. Until, as in this passage and
the remainder of the chapter - He considers giving up and laying waste to the
vineyard and threatening the people of Israel with destruction and exile.

We know that in the end God offered the ultimate means of salvation,
reconciliation and restoration.

So this image of God's love and care for His creation, although in many times
and many ways He has been disappointed and frustrated with the response to His
love and care, ... this image provides a context for considering the themes of
the other readings.

The Purpose of the Church
Some propositions about the purpose of the church ...

Notes for a talk on 21 January 2007

A glorious set of readings comprising the essentials of being believers:

In Luke 4: Acting in the power and guidance of the Spirit - Jesus, fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to preach good news .."

In 1 Cor 12: The unity of the Body. Paul's marvellous image of the parts of the body each playing their part in harmony in the unity of the whole. We are all united in the body of believers under Christ - no matter what our tradition, our liturgical practice, our forms of worship. Those who believe in Jesus are united in one body.

The diversity of gifts and ministries: apostles, prophets, teachers, workers of miracles, gifts of healing, helpers, administrators, speakers in tongues, and interpreters - we need them all, and they should all be found in a lively, healthy, part of the body that is fulfilling the mission.

In Nehemiah 8: And the example of the body acting together in unity in the OT story of Ezra. All the people assembled to hear the word of God. Learning together. They hear the Word and their response is worship. Not worship of the great teacher or leader, not worship of the book,

And all the people listened attentively to the Book of the Law. ... Ezra opened the book. All the people could see him because he was standing above them; and as he opened it, the people all stood up. Ezra praised the LORD, the great God; and all the people lifted their hands and responded, "Amen! Amen!" Then they bowed down and worshipped the LORD with their faces to the ground. (NIV)

I remember being bowled over by these when I first read them some years ago. Some one around here had a draft of 'Houses that Change the World' printed on a pile of A4 paper. It was like a gale of fresh air bringing hope of release from the cage of institutional church, summarised into fifteen compact challenging statements.

So where are we now? Did that gale actually move us anywhere? Well, a couple of years ago a different blast moved us out of the institutional church. And for twelve months we have been gathering on Sundays twice a month in a home. The order for our gathering is very much formed by our lifetime experience of churches.

And Marc has summarised emerging church according to TSK into one PowerPoint slide. According to this, church "Happens on The Way" and making (and keeping) friends are one of the four processes in church planting.

So our church is happening on the way. A bunch of friends finding the way to be church, although our style and culture is somewhat different from TSK's. We don't meet in a pub where they have draught Guinness. (I hope meeting in a pub with draught Guinness is not normative for being Emerging Church). Nevertheless, we do carry a lot of traditional baggage - so there are probably other respects in which we do not conform to the classic emerging model, maybe we're traditional emerging.

Notes for a Talk on 2006-12-03 First in Advent

Theme the coming of Jesus

Intro - Advent 1 - New Year on the Church Calendar

Advent: we prepare for the coming of Jesus. Using today's readings and a couple of other references I want to try to put the coming of Jesus into the context of God's big plan for the universe.

The coming of Jesus is a momentous event. Jesus was there in the beginning of creation. (John 1:1-3 ) Jesus came to earth, born as a human child. Jesus sent His Spirit - the Comforter, the Spirit of God at Pentecost in Acts 2 and He continues to come as we receive His Spirit. Jesus will come again in glory. So Jesus has come, is coming and will come again.

The Big PictureNow to try to explain what I mean by the 'big picture' that forms the context for Jesus' coming. This is a perspective which struck me in a passage of a book I have been slowly reading for some time and which I have referred to here before. Eugene H. Peterson "Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places" . This is the first in a series of five books laying a theological foundation for the 21st century. The next in the series is about reading the Bible and is entitled "Eat This Book" .

The idea which captured me is that the purpose of God throughout the history of the universe is salvation. It comes in the following passage:

A short while ago I had an exchange of comments with Mark on madetopraisehim on the topic of "protocols we've created to approach God". Mark had used that phrase in a comment and it caught my attention.

Part of the trigger for me was the word "protocol". In the context of my work it has to do with automated communications and systems for business to business communications. And I have the idea that all parties that are in communication using the protocol have to know the protocol and have to have agreed to its specification. So when Mark wrote about protocols WE have created to approach God, I thought, "wait a minute, what does God think about these protocols? When did He sign up for an interchange agreement using these protocols? Do we think we can set these protocols up one sidedly and expect God to conform?"

Recently, in the context of discussions about our own gathering, I have been thinking about commitment in the context of the community that is the church.

It seems to me there needs to be some degree of commitment by individuals who form the community - commitment to the community, commitment to one another, commitment to God. In our gathering, on the one hand there is some felt need for expressing some commitment, on the other hand no basis available or recognised on which to build it. Other house churches in our area seem to operate without explicit commitments - who ever turns up is welcome, and there is no expectation that any specific collection of people will turn up. I have the feeling that this is too amorphous and laissez faire to function effectively as church, the Body of Christ. But I am not at all sure how the commitment I am missing should be formulated and expressed. As soon as you start to write it down a whole ecclesiology and legal system springs into existence.

With these thoughts in mind I read with interest two essays on Pneumanaut Studio that try to make a distinction between 'covenant' and 'contract' - "Kontract Kills Kommunity" and "Covenant Creates Community". I feel for this distinction - 'contract' requires a legal system as its basis, wheres 'covenant' seems somehow softer, relationship oriented, based on honour and mutual understanding, healed by grace if one party fails.

I was asked to lead the prayers of intercession for our gathering today (2 July). The basic format is according to the CofE Common Worship liturgy. I made the prayers for the church and for the world based on themes and conversations of recent days.

The texts are worthy of Pentecost. It is notable that they come here in the church calendar. We have just been celebrating the birth of Jesus and then we have these texts on baptism and not only baptism in water but baptism in the Spirit.

This is why Jesus came – not only to bring forgiveness of our sins but to make us part of the process with Him and the Father and the Spirit.